Posted by Ken Moiarty on 03/21/06 11:13

Well guys, I finally found my 'holy grail' robot to physically automate
CD/DVD disc spanning for backup purposes. No I'm not talking about one of
those office copier sized machines that only institutions can get enough use
out of to get a return on their institutional sized investment. However, it
does come from that "industrial/institutional" category. Yet it is the
first of such products I've seen that a consumer like myself could talk
myself into buying (admittedly, though, with my eyes closed) It's the MF
Digital Baxter Automated CD DVD Duplicator. But it doesn't just duplicate
or make disc copies. It's primarily what's they call an "autodisc loader".
It can be used in any of many different ways, including spanning DVD discs
for backup data. And the price is an almost down to earth $839.00.
Admittedly more than most large hard drives are sold for today. But for
that price you can't backup to tape cartridge of much quanitity. It holds
up to 25 discs at a time, robotically moving discs into and out of write
drives as needed. That's roughly 115 GB (or if you use DVD-R dual layer or
DVD+R double-layer discs, approximately 210 GB) per unattended backup
session. I would personally have no problem reloading the unit with fresh
discs as often as two or three or more times if necessary, to backup all
hard drive images in my computer to DVD-RW, DVD-RAM or whatever. I could
load up and start the backup process before I leave for work. Come home
after work and repeat the process. Do the same at bedtime (if still
necessary by now) to complete the backup. (I don't know if it can write to
BD disks, but if it and/or when it does, once BD disc prices become
affordable the 25 disc capacity will no longer pose any potential mild
inconvenience whatsoever, and total backups to DVD will be able to routinely
started and completed automatically according to schedule with only the most
infrequent and briefest of human intervention.)
I would still use a large external hard drive for completely hands off
routine nightly backup of course. But every few weeks at most I could do
this redundant DVD backup as well for a complementary kind of redundancy not
far from totally secure data backup. And I could even easily make automated
disk copies of my backup DVDs for even more backup redundancy. Hence, for
the first time I could consider what gets stored in my computer to be safer
from loss than that which I presently print paper hard copies of so as to
file in a physical filing cabinet (e.g. banking transactions, software
purchases, etc...etc...).

Heres the link: http://www.proactionmedia.com/proddetail.asp?prod=E5910

Ken

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